We’ve reached the second iteration. There isn’t a lot separating us from the third iteration. And the material conditions were bad enough, at the latest, sometime between the first and the second iterations.
People know socialism exists. People are experiencing sufficiently bad material conditions that they want change.
People have picked up neoliberal ideas from living in a neoliberal society. These ideas give people a framework to process their material conditions so that they do not rise up in sufficient numbers. People need to learn that these ideas are part of an ideology designed to enrich the owner class at the expense of the worker class. Things will continue to get worse unless people understand that everyone needs to own their work.
This education is work that still needs to be done after hypothetically defeating the current fascist dictatorships and is probably part of what will be needed to defeat them.
I keep having this conversation with people and seeing the accelerationist line of reasoning, so I wanted to address it with a visual.
They at least know it exits enough to learn more about it in theory. The issue is that when trying to explain socialism to other people, it is often rejected out of pocket. Neoliberalism is a major culprit in this. People often say things like, socialism doesn’t work or the Soviet Union collapsed.
People will still need to learn about socialism in more detail, that’s not in dispute. But neoliberal ideas are acting as a blocker for people to even want to learn more about other ideas like socialism. People can be placated by the incremental progress offered by neoliberals, when they don’t realize we need systemic change and wealth redistribution if we are going to fix problems like climate change and wealth inequality. edit: typo